I've provided two definitions that any reasonable person would regard as synonymous

With respect you're missing the point... it doesn't matter how many synonyms the word has or how many definitions as long as I used one of 'em correctly - which I did. MrB's suggestion was that it only had only one meaning that necessarily involved disproof of something.

If your argument is simply that to demand A does not make A valid--who can disagree with the truth of that proposition?

Unfortunately a few people on this forum... gay marriage is demanded so anyone who disagrees is homophobic.

km

I'm sorry, but the statement that you make here is not the same as the proposition with which I agree. I agree that to reject gay marriage is not equivalent to being homophobic--but that's very different from the statement that to demand gay marriage does not mean that gay marriage is valid.

Wrong again. Gay marriage wasn't, isn't now, and won't be "demanded". Rather, the question of "why not?" was presented. And you stand accused of homophobia because a.) your comments on the topic have a decidedly anti-gay slant, and b.) though asked repeatedly to reveal your personal viewpoint on same-sex marriage — devoid of any interpretation of the law — you routinely base your answers on *drum roll* your interpretation of the law. DOH!

Wrong - gay marriage has been and is 'demanded' by many proponents both explicitly and by necessary implication. The rest of what you say requires repetition of what I've previously posted so I'm afraid it's a low priority.

As I said, thinking that gay marriage ought not be permitted is not the same as being homophobic. There are many reasons not to favor gay marriage, and homophobia is only one of them. That said, I'm still waiting for an argument in support of the pope's assertion that gender is innate, which is where the thread started. Let me quote to you a couplet from Sarah Fyge Egerton's "The Emulation," written ca. 1703:

Moses who first our Freedom did rebuke,Was Marry'd when he writ the Pentateuch.

The gender expectations that Egerton lived under, she says, are mystified by religion and asserted as natural, but are really only a codification of male fears of disempowerment, as the subsequent couplet makes clear:

They're Wise to keep us Slaves, for well they know,If we were loose, we soon should make them so.

The superstructure of social practices intended to keep females in their "proper" gender position is truly breathtaking and leads Egerton to wonder what would happen were those social practices undone. So, she asks, "shall these finite Males reverse their Rules?" and answers herself: "No, we'll be Wits, and then Men must be Fools." It's obvious that she's playing the same zero-sum game that, she says, leads to the gender rules in the first place.

But the underlying point seems to me entirely right: if the gender rules are removed, there is no "natural" gendered behavior. We've seen some of that come to pass already, at least in the more "advanced" societies where most of us live. For instance, I would say that almost 100% of my students simply do not understand the meaning of "feminine" that I, and most of us over a certain age, grew up with. Presented with the entrapment of women in the social practices of the 16th or 17th or 18th or 19th century, they are completely puzzled as to why the women don't simply give the whole business a Bronx cheer and move on. It takes a lot of teaching to make them understand the complicated social frame (what Foucault calls discursive practices) that makes it impossible for that to happen

My point? In disagreeing with his holiness, I adduce my own experience of the way gendered behavior has actually changed over the course of my 56 years of life and how gender expectations differ between two very different social systems, one Latin American and one North American. My conclusion, that gender is socially constructed, rises directly from that experience, buttressed by lots of reading. Why then should I believe the bare assertion that gender is innate?

Heh heh... I assume you're referring to the once and glorious MCF days. While I was still there, I just ignored most of those posts. Why I don't just do the same here I don't know. Ah well, siwwy widdle me.

My conclusion, that gender is socially constructed, rises directly from that experience, buttressed by lots of reading. Why then should I believe the bare assertion that gender is innate?

I don't think one can say that gender is all socially constructed any more than one can say it's all hereditary. Since men and women bring different qualities to child-rearing for example on account of biological differences gender confusion whereby one or other is missing in the child's upbringing could be detrimental to his or her welfare in the sense that the best balance is denied.

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